UNIVERZITÀ KARLOVA V PRAZE
(University Charles V Prague)

DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES OF THE ORGANIZATION

The oldest university in central Europe, Charles University, was founded on April 7th 1348 by Charles IV, then the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia. From its foundation, it was devoted to studia generalia and it was endowed by the emperor with all the privileges enjoyed by older European universities. In accordance with medieval conceptions of the academic range of a complete university, the newly established university had four faculties - Theology, Law, Medicine and Arts.

It was only with the establishment of Czechoslovak statehood that Charles University gained a status that fully reflected its academic and cultural importance. Its significance was underlined by the fact that the leading representatives of the new state, such as T.G. Masaryk, Eduard Benes and others, came from its pre-war teaching faculty. The Nazi occupation in 1939 came as a massive blow to the university. On November 17th 1939, Prague University, like all other Czech institutions of higher education, was closed by force with a large number of students being interned in a concentration camp.

After the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945, the University began to develop rapidly in all its aspects. University life was soon, however, to be disrupted and distorted by the effects of the Communist putsch in February 1948. As a result of the role of teachers and students in the Prague Spring of 1968, a new and especially painful wave of purges hit the University and its faculties in the period of so-called normalisation at the beginning of the seventies.

Only after the revolution, which began on 17th November 1989, there was real change in a situation that had lasted more than forty years. The appointment of new representatives of a free academic community was legalised in January 1990; this marked the beginning of a systematic effort to remove the forty-year inheritance of deformation in the life of the University as an educational and academic institution.

Faculty of Education

Charles University’s Faculty of Education was opened in 1946. At present, this Faculty is one of the seventeen faculties of Charles University. Its objective is the training of teachers for all types and grades of schools and other educational institutions, as well as the training of specialists in the field of pedagogy, pedagogical and school psychology and the methodology of teaching.

The Faculty comprises 19 departments and two research institutes.